Lightweight library that eases integrating async components built for React PHP in a traditional, blocking environment.

React PHP provides you a great set of base components and a huge ecosystem of third party libraries in order to perform async operations. The event-driven paradigm and asynchronous processing of any number of streams in real time enables you to build a whole new set of application on top of it. This is great for building modern, scalable applications from scratch and will likely result in you relying on a whole new software architecture.

But let's face it: Your day-to-day business is unlikely to allow you to build everything from scratch and ditch your existing production environment.

This is where this library comes into play:

Let's block React PHP

More specifically, this library eases the pain of integrating async components into your traditional, synchronous (blocking) application stack.

The following example code demonstrates how this library can be used along with an async HTTP client to process two non-blocking HTTP requests and block until the first (faster) one resolves.

function blockingExample()
{
    // use a unique event loop instance for all parallel operations
    $loop = React\EventLoop\Factory::create();
    
    // this example uses an HTTP client
    // this could be pretty much everything that binds to an event loop
    $browser = new Clue\React\Buzz\Browser($loop);
    
    // set up two parallel requests
    $request1 = $browser->get('http://www.google.com/');
    $request2 = $browser->get('http://www.google.co.uk/');
    
    // keep the loop running (i.e. block) until the first response arrives
    $fasterResponse = Block\awaitAny(array($request1, $request2), $loop);
    
    return $fasterResponse->getBody();
}

This lightweight library consists only of a few simple functions. All functions reside under the Clue\React\Block namespace.

The below examples assume you use an import statement similar to this:

use Clue\React\Block;

Block\await(…);

Alternatively, you can also refer to them with their fully-qualified name:

\Clue\React\Block\await(…);

Each function is responsible for orchestrating the EventLoop in order to make it run (block) until your conditions are fulfilled.

$loop = React\EventLoop\Factory::create();

The sleep($seconds, LoopInterface $loop) method can be used to wait/sleep for $time seconds.

The await(PromiseInterface $promise, LoopInterface $loop) method can be used to block waiting for the given $promise to resolve.

The awaitAny(array $promises, LoopInterface $loop) method can be used to wait for ANY of the given promises to resolve.

The awaitAll(array $promises, LoopInterface $loop) method can be used to wait for ALL of the given promises to resolve.

The recommended way to install this library is through composer. New to composer?

{
    "require": {
        "clue/block-react": "~0.3.0"
    }
}

MIT